The Fugitive (1939) User Reviews (18)

British Proto-Noir.

[hitchcockthelegend · 8/10 · 28 April 2014]

Debate and confusion will always exist about when film noir starts and finishes, or if it should only appertain to one country. Importantly it will always be in the eye of the beholder, more so since many of the film makers back in the day didn't know they were making films that would soon become a film making style phenomenon.

On the Night of the Fire (AKA: The Fugitive) has everything a film noir lover could want. Directed by Brian Desmond Hurst and adapted from F.L. Green's novel of the same name, film stars Ralph Richardson, Diana Wynyard, Romney Brent, Mary Clare and Henry Oscar. Plot has Richardson as Will Kobling, a Tyneside barber in the North East of England, who after spying an open window at the local mill, lets temptation get the better of him and climbs in to steal the money that will hopefully end his family's financial woes. On such impulsive decisions does life alter...

From the off the pic is exuding a period of working class Britain from days of yore! It's all brickwork and cobbled streets, of musky docks, gin houses, beat street coppers and sweat stained barber shops where graft and honest toil is the order of the day. Magnificently hovering over proceedings is a swirling score by Miklós Rózsa (Double Indemnity/Criss Cross) and Germanic cinematography by Günther Krampf (Pandora's Box/The Ghoul), with these in full effect and director Hurst firmly dealing in a mood of pessimism, this really becomes a picture not complying with any sort of code ethics.

The characterisations are superbly dubious, story is awash with folk who are quick to turn on a sixpence to meet their ends. There's hysterical alcoholics, shifty loners, a business man who is not beyond expecting sexual favours to pay off a debt. Added into the pot is murder, blackmail and the corruption of someone we could quite easily sympathise with, all this and the fire that smoothers the town in smog, water and floating burnt cinders. The backdrop is set in noirish stone, Richardson is superb, and then the devilish hand of noir fate steps in to not cheat lovers of the film making medium.

A bit stagy at times and the likes of Mary Clare are too hysterical with their acting - where the director should have reined it in - but small complaints for anyone interested in British Proto-Noir before it even had a name. 8/10

Crime and Punishment

[rschorer · 8/10 · 9 May 2002]

I happened to catch this one on late night TV and was unable to switch it off and go to bed. The central character reminded me of Raskolnikov from Dostoevsky's 'Crime and Punishment' - how after committing the crime, his own guilt was more effective in punishing him than the efforts of the law.

While the acting tended to be very theatrical as was typical for the period, the camera work, sets and general appearance were above average and the plotting was tight and tension well maintained thoughout the film.

I gave it an 8.

It never rains but it pours.

[brogmiller · 7/10 · 3 May 2020]

Will Kobling, a hard working barber, succumbs to a temptation that so many of us might given the right circumstances and sets in motion a devastating train of events. Brian Desmond-Hurst was not a great director but a very capable one and keeps the momentum going. The fickleness of the mob and the way in which gossip spreads like wildfire are very well depicted. This would be a far lesser film however and would not be nearly as effective were it not for the presence of Ralph Richardson as Kobling and Diana Wynyard as his adoring wife. They are both magnificent. Excellent cinematography by Gunther Krampf but the score by Miklos Rozsa is far too biblical. Judging by the preponderance of Cockneys one finds it hard to believe it is set on Tyneside!

Dark and gloomy

[Leofwine_draca · 6/10 · 4 February 2020]

ON THE NIGHT OF THE FIRE is an engaging little bit of character drama mixed with important film noir tropes from Hollywood. The incongruous setting is Newcastle, where barber Ralph Richardson succumbs to petty theft in a moment of madness before finding his life quickly spiralling out of control. It's dark and gloomy stuff, with scenes of rampaging townsfolk reminiscent of the old Universal horrors, but the characters keep it grounded and interesting. Coming at the outset of WW2 this must have been bleak viewing indeed, which makes it an atypical kind of movie for its time.

Awesome British noir

[searchanddestroy-1 · 4 January 2023]

I am not a specialist of British films from the thirties and forties, but this one, which I discovered at the French Cinémathèque in 1988, amazed me so much. It is a drama, truly tragic thriller drama starring a terrific Ralph Richardson, grabs you, holds you from the beginning till the end. I have always thought that Ralph Richardson had the same face as Michel Serrault, the French actor, who would also had been excellent in this kind of character. The scheme looks like a James Hadley Chase's novel with a lead desperate character who looks like you and me, and who slowly but surely becomes a murderer, because of his mone issues and a blackmailer. A greedy blackmailer. The tooic where audiences can't prevent to become full of empathy for the mai character, no matter what he does to survive. Outstanding British crime flick. By the way, speaking of British masterpieces fromt he forties, what a gem THE WICKED LADY, the Leslie Arliss's film, starring Margaret Lockwood in a kind of Gene Tierney in LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN.

Enjoyable British crime drama

[chris_gaskin123 · 7/10 · 31 January 2005]

I recently purchased a copy on VHS of On Night Of the Fire from a market stall and was pleased I did.

A barber climbs through an open window and steals £100 he sees on a table. He steals this as he is in debt, but his wife doesn't know about this. He uses £75 of this stolen money to get himself out of debt. The barber then murders somebody, the same night a big fire takes place in the town. He sends his wife and young child away for safety but is killed in a car crash towards the end and the barber is shot dead after he finds out about his wife's death.

Part of this movie is shot on location in Newcastle Upon Tyne and is shot well in black and white.

The movie stars Ralph Richardson as the barber Will Kobling, Diana Wynyard as his wife and are joined by Henry Oscar and Glynis Johns.

This is a rather obscure movie and is worth seeing if you get the chance.

Rating: 3 stars out of 5.

The days before bank security

[AAdaSC · 6/10 · 17 December 2023]

In 1930s Newcastle, if you worked in a bank, you could leave money unattended in an empty room and leave the window open. This was especially a good thing to do in a poor working-class area near the docks. We seem to have developed our ideas since then. Anyway, for this film, barber Ralph Richardson (Will) comes across this scenario and decides to go for it and pinch the money just sitting there inviting his attention. Well, he is now £100.00 richer. Nice one.

However, what is he going to do with his new wealth? Oh no, his wife Diana Wynyard (Kit) has got herself into debt by owing the local tailor Henry Oscar (Pillinger) for outfits so she can keep up appearances. She is being pressured for payment of debts and this is where the bulk of Richardson's wealth is absorbed. Typical - just when he was planning a happy life for his family, a woman has ruined it!

Thanks to a money laundering trail, the police put a watch on Oscar's movements which leads to bribery and murder.

The film is a character study of how things can go terribly wrong so easily for what is essentially a good man - Ralph Richardson. This is about his descent. The film has a good setting and story although it does occasionally drag in the 2nd half. It also contains a terribly over-the-top performance of a screaming woman that looks like Miriam Margolyes. Definitely a relative. We also get a young barber's apprentice who features quite prominently in the story and doesn't even get a mention in the credits. How unfair is that! He also has a strong cockney accent and taken with the other accents in the film, you would assume that this is set in London. Nope. It's Newcastle. Obviously before the Geordie accent was invented for the purposes of Reality TV shows.

Powerful and harrowing drama, a lost tragic classic

[robert-temple-1 · 9/10 · 9 May 2008]

This film is brilliantly directed by the largely forgotten Irish director, Brian Desmond Hurst, and brilliantly performed by its entire cast. But it is largely a 'downer', with its plot of the unremitting grinding of the wheels of Fate. It was filmed in 1939 and released in the spring of 1940. With entry into war, the British public no longer wanted tragedies but 'feel-good films', and they must have tried to forget this film, which was too much like reality to be comfortable. This film is really more like the post-War 'noir' films of America, where doom awaits. It must have been the last of the gritty 1930s British film dramas before the ultimate grit of the Blitz hit in 1940. The film is fascinating in many respects. It shows in intimate detail the life of a working-class urban community in Britain, in those last pre-War moments before most such communities were wiped out forever by German bombs. There are many wonderful location shots of the docks and streets of such areas, later reduced to rubble. For much of the film, I struggled to figure out which part of old London near the docks this could be, and thought I recognised a street near the wharves of old Lambeth (near the reconstructed Globe Theatre) which was only finally demolished about 20 years ago. But towards the end of the film, we are shown a shot of the unmistakable railway bridge hurting northwards across the river into Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and I realized this film must have been meant to take place at Newcastle. But no one in the film has 'Geordie' accents (the unmistakable accent of Newcastle folk). They all speak like Londoners except for Sara Allgood, who does her best to suppress her Irish lilt (she was a famous actress from the old Abbey Theatre in Dublin whom Hurst had directed in his earlier films 'Irish Hearts' of 1934 and 'Riders to the Sea' of 1935.) The young Glynis Johns, aged 17 and already in her fifth film, appears as a fey maid in this film. But the central performances are those of Ralph Richardson and Diana Wynyard, as a couple faced with a terrible dilemma. Wynyard is often of the verge of screaming hysteria in this desperate tale, but her stiff upper lip triumphs. Richardson was perfect for these parts as an introspective and worried husband, and was what you might call 'a steady presence on screen'. His great ability was to stand with the camera on his face and suddenly, as we watch, achieve 'realization' of something, with a nervous narrowing and slight twitching of his eyes. Henry Oscar is marvellously creepy as a miser who sits counting his money alone in his shop at hight, while listening to records of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos. (The director makes good use of this, and a special shot featuring the gramophone, which is very effective, was later much copied by other directors.) This is an almost unbearably intense tragedy, thoroughly convincing, but it won't cheer you up, so be strong.

Shave And A Haircut

[writers_reign · 5/10 · 28 September 2010]

Diana Wynyard didn't have much luck with her on-screen husbands. The same year this was released (it had been shot the previous year) Anton Walbrook was doing his level best to drive her insane in Gaslight and here she is saddled with thief and murderer Ralph Richardson. Richardson had already played one barber on stage, the eponymous Sheppy, in what turned out to be the last play written (in 1934) by Somerset Maugham and in 1939 he returned to the profession via this risible film in which not one single frame rings true. Much is made of its setting, Newcastle-upon-Tyne yet we listen in vain for a Geordie accent and Richardson's young apprentice persists in addressing any and everyone as 'guv'nor', an expression peculiar to Cockneys. Diana Wynyard makes no attempt to disguise her cut-glass accent and perhaps because the plot calls for her to owe some £84 to a tradesman, reminiscent of Emma Bovary, she plays her Geordie wife with a touch of the French bourgeoisie. In passing the price of buttons, dusters, net curtains etc must have been astronomical in pre-war Newcastle for her to accummulate such a debt a few pence at a time but clearly the film is not too concerned about realism despite realism being a selling point. Essentially a load of old tosh.

This Close to Film Noir

[boblipton · 9/10 · 24 April 2017]

If the only movie he had directed had been 1951's 'A Christmas Carol', Brian Desmond Hurst would have been a great director. Imagine my happiness to watch this movie and discover another great movie from the man.

Ralph Richardson is a barber in a poor street in an unnamed port city; wife Diana Wynard has just given birth to a daughter and money is tight. One evening, Richardson is walking through the street. He passes by a bank and spots a pile of cash. He hops through the window, grabs it, hops back out and goes home -- to a life that involves blackmail, murder, riot and suicide.

It's about two whiskers from straight film noir. Small man seeking a place in a decent society? Check. German Expressionist cinematographer? Check (it's Gunther Krampf, whose work on NOSFERATU was uncredited). Echoes of French Poetic Realism and doom? Check. It misses on a couple of points, like the presence of actual criminal masterminds, but it delivers on almost everything else.

Ralph Richardson is superb -- as he is in every role I've seen him in. For those who like to play spot-the-star, Glynis Johns has a role with two lines in her second year in the movies; she does has a credit at the bottom of the cast list.

Writers_reign supreme."A load of old tosh"

[howardmorley · 2/10 · 7 November 2013]

I read all the user reviews first and disagreed with all their comments except with that of "writers_reign".This film is a "lot of old tosh".I have seen many Ralph Richardson (RR) movies and have generally liked most of his performances.The fault lies with the film producers hence I only awarded this film 2/10.I am now 67 and have seen many films from this period.The main faults of this film in my opinion are:

1.No evidence of a genuine working class vernacular "Geordie" accent for a drama set in Newcastle was noticeable from any of the actors.Thus it did not reflect enough of the local atmosphere in the North-East of England.As "writers_reign states, even the female lead, (Diana Wyngard), had a posh cut glass accent!.

2.As this is yet another claustrophobic studio bound production, the impression was more of a small village where everyone knows everyone else rather than a big city like Newcastle with a much more diverse ethnic mix to the population.The producers get up to a few tricks like actual newsreels of fires and stock footage of Newcastle but it did not convince or work, then we are back to dark moody studio interiors once again.

3.I get tired of the inevitable moral twist by the British Board of Film Censors at the time who decreed that every criminal must get his just deserts or surrender to justice.The anti-hero played by RR had a lot of my sympathy and it was a very tame ending to the film but that was the moral compass at the time.

4.A bunch of old harridans spread rumours about RR with which everyone and his dog agrees even forming a vigilante gang to attack his barber shop.What happened to the principle "everyone is innocent until legally proved guilty and why are people so ready to believe only rumours of guilt?

A very tame film by the producers.

Another Remarkable Film Noir from an Acclaimed Novelist

[JohnHowardReid · 10/10 · 25 July 2008]

A major discovery of national television's Rank library retrospective, On the Night of the Fire seems to have been pushed into the critics' background by the huge artistic and commercial success of the author's later Odd Man Out. While there are an unusually large number of parallels between both films (and presumably the Green novels on which they're based), there are just as many divergences to make both equally fascinating.

Both novels are set in a particular city — Belfast in Odd Man Out, Newcastle in On the Night of the Fire — where such an extraordinarily large use is made in both movies of their actual streets and locations, that the cities themselves, as Green certainly intended, become protagonists in their rather grim stories.

Both novels (and their movie counterparts) have as their central character an odd man out, a loner, someone who is initially well-liked but doesn't fit into his surroundings because he seems to be above the good citizens who hem him in on every side. It's a difficult relationship to keep up, and in both films it breaks down when the people (or most of them) reject him.

In both movies, this central character resolves his dilemma in exactly the same way.

In other words (not to give too much of the plot away), the police play exactly the same role of hunters, persecutors and eventually just so slightly unwilling executioners.

In both pictures, the plot is set in motion by a crime — a simple crime of robbery which goes horribly wrong.

At this point occur the first major divergences. In Odd Man Out, the robbery is deliberately planned. In On the Night of the Fire, it occurs casually, on the spur of the moment, as a split-second opportunity suddenly and unexpectedly seized. In Odd Man Out, the results are immediate. In Fire, the catastrophe is a long time building up. In Odd Man, the robbery is a joint endeavor. In Fire, it's just one man against the system.

Sir Ralph Richardson would seem at first sight an unlikely choice for the role of a humble barber. But actually his somewhat mannered performance and his posh accent are perfect for the role of society's victim. Likewise Diana Wynyard as the wife who also dreams of something better.

Henry Oscar plays the slimy blackmailer. His is a truly frightening creation, whilst Mary Clare's appropriately unnerving Crazy Lizzy is also an inspired piece of casting.

As a traitor with a conscience, Romney Brent has a difficult role, but he manages to achieve complete conviction. Sara Allgood contributes her usual effective study of a malicious gossip. A young Glynis Johns can merely be glimpsed briefly as a rather suitably drab servant-girl, yet Guy Middleton in a larger part as the van driver at the hospital is not credited at all (he uses his real voice too, not the fruity accent he was later to adopt).

Brian Desmond Hurst's direction has surprising impact, although a lot of the film's stunning power and effects are derived from Gunther Krampf's atmospheric lighting, John Bryan's cramped yet extensive sets, and especially Miklos Rozsa's typical, melodically percussive score.

Doesn't stand the test of time

[billsoccer · 5/10 · 2 September 2020]

This may have been a decent drama in the 1930's, but it's not up to todays standards - the acting, the script, the photography is just not good enough. Skip it

A vicious circle of one false step leading to a maze of disasters

[clanciai · 9/10 · 9 January 2023]

You recognise the moods, the characters, the situations, the environment, the hopelessness and the profound pathos of love from "Odd Man Out" eight years later by the same author, who apparently was obsessed with the theme of the outsider being hunted to death but always nevertheless finding a way out. Here the love story is more mature, they are married and deeply in love with each other and have a baby, when Ralph Richardson is subject to an irresistible temptation as he passes by a window and sees a lot of money lying on the table. That's the first crime, starting the vicious circle of consecutive crimes resulting from the first one, going inevitably from bad to worse. You can understand them, he is.a barber and they live in small circumstances in humdrum squalid quarters, and she feels guilty for his crime since she by her extravagant expenses have put them in debt - to a blackmailer. So they have no choice but to protect each other as far as possible, and naturally there are other circumstances sabotaging their efforts, like a city fire and a dreadful car accident. It's sad story but brilliantly acted by Ralph Richardson and Diana Wynyard, always a supreme beauty, accompanied by a great score by Miklos Rosza; but the best scenes are the mass scenes, mainly at the pub centering around the balmy Lizzie, an old tramp who is a regular customer with the police. It's a great prelude to "Odd Man Out", and it's interesting to compare them, both for their differences and their common assets.

Risible if it wasn't so miserable

[GARRIMDB · 1/10 · 10 August 2020]

Absolutely bewildered by the amount of high ratings for this film. Just because it's old and has the great Ralph Richardson in it doesn't make it a good film! As a couple of others have mentioned I had no idea this film is supposedly set in Newcastle as I could not detect one single Geordie accent. Even Mr Richardson seems to employ three of four different ones and not one of them as a native of the North East. The story is preposterous - a seemingly meek and mild law abiding fellow decides to steal some money because it was there and later even commits murder. Another ridiculous aspect is his wife racking up a debt of £84 on clothes which had to be a huge sum of money when the film was set considering her husband was only charging pennies for a haircut and shave! There is so much over acting personified by Mary Clare's dreadful performance as the nutjob Lizzie and to a lesser extent Dave Crowley as boxer Jim. And the way the film depicts the working class as a thick, violent, ignorant mob is disgraceful and insulting. The only redeeming aspect of this film is that there is some effective and moody lighting at times but that doesn't save it from a mark of one from this reviewer!

Suffering Can Only Be Borne to a Sufficient Point...

[richardchatten · 8/10 · 7 January 2020]

A relentlessly harrowing drama that anticipates Sidney Lumet's 'Before the Devil Knows You're Dead' (2007) by nearly seventy years.

I once saw a silent film that I correctly guessed was going to turn out to be a bad dream since the hero's plight had escalated so far out of control that was the only way it could possibly be resolved; and resorting to making it All a Dream has ruined quite a few fine films in its time (as well as coming as a great relief when I've woken up a few times)!

'On the Night of the Fire' is such a film. As Ralph Richardson's situation grew more and more desperate in this Tyneside (not that you'd know it from the accents) 'Crime and Punishment' the more convinced I became that it was all going to end with him waking up to discover that it had all just been a nightmare.

Or was it?

A Real Actor

[brislack · 9/10 · 31 October 2020]

This film started off a little slow, with Ralph Richardson playing a mild-mannered barber. Then it gradually unravels with him a hard-nosed murderer! This actor slowly changes before our eyes. Great stuff! One little character was a not glamorous Glynis Johns, later a real sex-boomb...

Very watchable

[martinepstein · 8/10 · 12 September 2020]

A film well worth watching similar in some ways to Odd Man Out about a man on the run and the working class life of a British city but without Carol Reed's cinematic flair. The acting was impressive, especially by Sir Ralph ,Diana Wynyard and Henry Oscar. And by the way the film was made for 1939 audiences not those in 2020.